Re: SEUL: Distrib: Some thoughts

[Gabriel Krabbe <satan@bofh.studfb.unibw-muenchen.de>]

On Jun 2, Greg Bell wrote
regarding "Re: SEUL: Distrib: Some thought": 
> 
> On another point, many of the participants of the list seem to think
> that latex is the way to go for documentation 
[...]
> Reguardless of ones feelings towards TeX, LaTex, et al, I get the 
> distinct impression that for the greater percentage of linux users 
> there is not a device independent printer available to them.  Would it 
> be possible (or worth the effort) to create seperate drivers for specific 
> printers???

definitely not. it would, however, be desirable to grab one of the many
so-called "magic filters" and add a pretty interface to the setup of 
that. this would leave the user with the command "lpr <document>" w/o
the need to know about different file formats, filters etc.

most unix apps recognize postscript as standard printing format, and
justly so; defaulting to raw forwarding of whatever is sent to the lpd
in case it can't be identified as a known, filtered format, is a more
than reasonable fallback if an app decides to implement it's own printer
driver. 

[...]
> For the targets of SEUL there are basically 3 types of printers
> available.  1) daisy wheel, 2) inkjet and 3)laser.  From my observations
[...]

from _my_ observation there probably isn't a printer in common use that
isn't supported by ghostscript. 

> So my idea is that a printer deamon be developed that would allow for
> the insertion of that information that is specific to a type of printer
> so that to install a new printer all one would have to do is point to a
> new printer  which could be done on a command line type interface.

better yet, add a text/graphic interface that adds the appropriate magic
entries. if someone has more than one printer attached to the same 
computer (how common is this, when practically all pcs come with one
parallel port?), then, he'll have to learn about "lpr -Pprinter? <file>".

don't reinvent the wheel and write new daemons when all you need to do is
stick to standard unix-philosophy and combine a number of tools, adding
a pretty interface to configure them.

-- 
Gabriel
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